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Is international migration an adaptation strategy to sudden or gradual climatic shocks? In this paper we investigate the direct and the indirect role of climatic shocks in developing countries as a determinant of out-migration flows toward rich OECD countries in the period 1990-2001. Contrarily to the bulk of existing studies we use a macro approach and explicitly consider the heterogeneity of climatic shocks (type, size, sign of shocks and seasonal effects). Our results show that the occurrence of adverse climatic events in origin countries has significative direct and indirect effects on out-migration from poor to rich countries. JEL code: Q54, F22

The existing economic literature focuses on the benefits that return migrants offer to their home country in terms of entrepreneurship and human and financial capital accumulation. However, return migration can have modest or even some detrimental effects if the migration experience was unsuccessful and/or if the migrant fails to re-integrate into the home country’s economy. In our paper, we empirically show which factors – both individual characteristics and features related to the migration experience – influence the likelihood of a sub-optimal employment of returnees’ human capital employing an original dataset on a representative sample of return migrants in Silesia (Poland)

Job creation is one of the main challenges for developing countries. The aim of this paper is to analyse the relation between foreign ownership and employment using an original firm‐level dataset that covers 19 sub‐Saharan African countries. Our results show that although foreign firms are generally larger than local ones, the employment they generate is relatively more unskilled labour intensive compared with that generated by domestic firms. We discover substantial differences between foreign investors from the north and the south, in terms of both skill intensity and wage premiums. We also find that, ceteris paribus, Chinese firms employ more workers (mostly blue‐collar workers) and pay lower wages for both skilled and unskilled workers compared with both domestic firms and other foreign investors. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.